Monday, February 29, 2016

On the environment I support dictatorship

Regarding environmental issues that concern the whole earth I am opposed to democracy and support dictatorship, a dictatorship of wise men and women who develop a wise policy for the world community. Governments, businesses and citizens should implement these wise policies dutifully and, ideally, with conviction and sense of world citizenship. I believe and hope that this would be possible. For this we do not need a eurozone but an EU that creates as much as possible agreement among its citizens - an EU that is able to make itself popular.

You're right, as long as there is power politics, it is wise to make yourself strong in your own region. But, at the same time, you have to work on a change of mentality: you should not pursue power and out compete the other but promote power-sharing and cooperation with others. We're all together in this small and fragile world, and we must love each other and have interest in each other.

What about the ordinary citizen? Is he / she a pawn or participant in society that can be manipulated or is he / she an actor who co-determines society? Both. In today's Western democracies, the citizen has become too much a pawn or voting-cattle that can be easily manipulated. That is unfortunate and bad for our democracies. And we must never forget that Hitler was elected by the German people.

Only by empowering citizens in a good way (through good education, good media, and grassroots democracy) you have democracies in the true sense of its name. If not, they are playground and plaything of populist politicians (coming from political parties, business and other groups).

There is a long way to go and on the way (in the meantime) important decisions must be made by political leaders; they can not avoid it.

I applaud the climate agreement in Paris. Instead of being cynical by saying "it will be too late" and "governments will not take the measures necessary, because the companies and the people in their countries do not like that", it seems to me important to not give in to cynicism and to continue to give hope to people.

About Me

As a kid I liked numbers and the sound of strings. I considered studying engineering but chose social sciences because of my interest in people. I combine a theoretical interest with a practical, social approach which brought me to the sphere of policy research. I am interested in reducing the disparity between poor and rich, between the powerful and the less powerful.
In 1973 and 1982 I lived in Latin America. In the mid-1980s, I was able to create an international forum to discuss the functioning of the international monetary system and the debt crisis, the Forum on Debt and Development (FONDAD). I established it with the view that the debt crisis of the 1980s was a symptom of a malfunctioning, flawed global monetary and financial system.
I was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the European Network on Debt and Development that was established at the end of the 1980s to help put pressure on European policymakers.
In 1990, before the beginning of the Gulf War, I cofounded the Golfgroep, a discussion group about international politics comprising journalists, scientists, politicians and activists that meets regularly.
The website of FONDAD is www.fondad.org